


It Rises

by escritoireazul



Category: Seattle Kraken "A Legend from the Deep Awakens" (Promotional Video)
Genre: Gen, Hockey, Yuletide Treat, blood sacrifice
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-12-25
Updated: 2020-12-25
Packaged: 2021-03-10 16:28:04
Rating: General Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,036
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/28310148
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/escritoireazul/pseuds/escritoireazul
Summary: Mount Rainier burns the day the kraken comes.
Comments: 5
Kudos: 21
Collections: Yuletide 2020





	It Rises

**Author's Note:**

  * For [plastics](https://archiveofourown.org/users/plastics/gifts).



Mount Rainier burns the day the kraken comes.

It doesn’t erupt. It _burns_ , flames reaching to the sky, driving out the low-hanging gray clouds that hide the mountain from the city in the distance. Fire everywhere, white hot. It burns throughout the day and into the night, a beacon in the darkness, a lighthouse guiding ships to a false safety.

It burns, it guides, it casts aside the night, and from the depths of the ocean, something heeds its call. Rises, slow and steady, from the indescribable darkness, until, with daylight, it slips from the water and pierces the sky.

*

Brigid is at the Market when the kraken comes. It’s early, but the Market is busy. Not so many tourists this early, but people fill it well enough. She wants fresh fish and warm bread, a nice dinner for her new roommate. She’s due at the rink late that afternoon to do some skating with the other goalies, needs to get this done and back in the fridge before she goes. She could buy fish pretty much anywhere, but even five years on, she loves the Market more than most places she goes.

There’s a shout from closer to the water. It’s far enough away Brigid doesn’t think much of it at first. Then comes another, and another, and a rising scream. She pushes through the crowd, trying to get clear. At first, others are moving with her, then from the western edge, people start shoving at them, moving the opposite way. Running, almost, and then definitely, faster and faster.

A man slams into her left shoulder hard enough it aches. A woman trips over her; it takes all Brigid’s quick reflexes to help her keep her feet. Another man, another push. More people, their bodies hot against hers, their breath fast, their faces twisted.

She’s solid and strong. Spends her life on skates, half crouched, and carries heavy gear most of that time. This is nothing like that. Still, she sets herself against the frantic rush of the crowd and makes her way through.

Then, when she can see the water, she almost wishes she hadn’t.

A tentacle rises from the ocean, a deep blue-purple so dark it is almost black except for when the sun rising at her back catches it just right. It is big. Thicker than a tree. Tall enough to curl around the Space Needle, she thinks, if it were there instead of here. Taller still, it rises, water sheeting from it. 

It ripples as it moves, something strong beneath the skin.

There’s fire on the mountain and a monster in the water.

Brigid stares and stares until her eyes burn.

Then, because she doesn’t know what else to do, she heads for the rink.

*

It can take a good amount of time to get between the Market and the complex in Northgate, and Brigid expects it to be even longer today, but everyone who runs away from the water goes southeast, and she makes good time. 

(There are far more people not running than people who are, and she spares a moment to wonder how long it will take for news to spread, whether she’s hallucinating something along with everyone else who saw it, if there’s been another tentacle rising or something much worse instead.)

She’s supposed to meet her teammates at the practice rink, but that’s later, and she’s not too surprised to find it dark when she arrives. She thought some of the rest of her teammates were doing some skating earlier in the afternoon, but she wasn’t paying much attention to them, focused as she was on the other goalies, the ones she wants to impress (them and the coach, at least).

It is a little weird that the entire building is dark, she’s never seen it fully empty, but maybe she’s just never there at the right time.

The building is _not_ , though. She can hear voices the moment she walks inside and, despite the harsh edge to the words she can’t quite make out, she still follows the sound. 

Brigid’s always been far too curious for her own good and braver than most. It serves her well on the ice. She knows she should probably be a little more careful off it, but that’s not really her style.

Slowly, the noises become voices she recognizes and words she can understand, though she’s not actually too pleased about that. Again, she’s driven to get closer, to _hear_ just as she was to _see_ and again, she almost wishes she didn’t.

It’s Coach Conway and the team captain, Tarasenko, and the rest of the team. Binnington, the main goalie, sees her first, and she makes her way to him. He gives her a nod.

She knows these people, has known this set for years now, but she’s never heard them like this.

“It’s twenty-four all over again,” Coach says. He looks like he’s aged a couple decades since she saw him last a couple days ago. And, technically, it is twenty-four all over again, what with New Year’s Eve just passed, but that’s not what he means. Even at her most optimistic, she knows that much.

“What happened in twenty-four?” That from the only other woman on the team, and the newest member, Allen. She’s third string, and young, but she’s fast and good with the puck. Brigid was glad to see her drafted and gladder still when she finally arrived.

Coach sighs. Rubs his hand over his face.

Then he tells him a story of the great Metropolitans, their Stanley Cup, their skill, their love for the city and the city’s love for them -- and then the end of the team. The real reason behind it, blood and fire on the ice, strength as a gift, and the loss of it too much to continue.

The kraken came for Seattle one hundred years ago, swam its way right through Puget Sound and to the city’s shoreline, and it comes again today. A kraken rises. A mountain burns. The city needs ice and blood and fire.

Brigid really wishes she’d just stayed in bed this morning.

*

Sacrifice doesn’t have to mean death, Coach tells them, and she’s glad to hear it. She loves Seattle, its hills and too much traffic, the Microsoft monster the beating heart of Redmond and Bellevue to the east, the smell of people and exhaust and pine trees and saltwater, the way the sky sits too low during much of the year and how good it feels when the sun finally comes out, but she doesn’t want to die for it, and she doesn’t want any of her teammates to die either.

Sacrifice does mean putting on their skates and taking to the ice. Coach shows them the patterns to make, winding things that bring them twisting around each other, cutting across previous paths. 

Then the rink is silent but for Coach’s low chanting and the cut of their skates.

The scrape of skates on ice is in her blood, has been from the moment her mother brought her out onto the frozen lake only a few weeks after she was born. In the middle of the worst blizzard in the last fifty years, her father claims, that’s when she decided to come squalling into the world, but if you ask Brigid, not that anyone does, she really came to life when her mother walked onto the ice where her older siblings skated and held a baby, wrapped in an unbelievable amount of layers, over the ice.

Brigid was born then, on that ice, and feels reborn now.

They skate, circle and twist. It’s like a dance, and somehow less. It’s like a fight, and somehow more.

She’s not been skating long enough, hard enough for her muscles to burn the way they do, for her lungs to work so hard. She’s gasping for air, dragging it in, and her legs hurt, her thighs tight, her ass, and her hands shake even when she squeezes them into fists.

One by one, they swing to the center of the ice. Tarasenko stands there, tall on his skates, back straight. He holds an obsidian knife with a thin, dangerous edge, but he’s careful when he cuts the inside of their forearms. Shallow cuts; they still bleed.

Blood puddles before him, thick and spreading slowly. There’s far more of it than he’s let from their arms. Brigid skates away from the center, arms cradled against her chest, and her skates leave a trail of blood behind, thick and dark. Impossible but there.

Coach shouts something and the blood starts burning, flames rushing from the center out to the edges. Still they skate, blood on their arms, flames licking at their bodies. Faster, she knows. They all know. Faster. Faster still.

Brigid spreads her arms out, embraces the fire and the cold. Lets her blood fall. Closes her eyes and falls into darkness.

She moves still, she knows, skates those patterns. Her body won’t stop. Her heartbeat, her breathing, her synapses, none of it stops. Still, somehow, again impossibly, the sound of skates on ice chases her away from the rink.

*

There is darkness and burning, blood and ice on her tongue. Voices she doesn’t know, voices she does. Screaming and shouting and chanting, a knife to her skin, and through everything, through always, through all the things she’s been and all the things she’s yet to become --

she’s born to the ice, born in the wind and the snow, born in blood and heat

\-- the scrape of skate on ice.

*

There is water, dark and cold, and in the distance, a light calling calling calling. She rises, and a great weight lifts from her one slow undulation at a time. The light, it burns for her, and she moves to it and great metal things break beneath her touch, no matter how gentle.

She is not gentle. Has never been. Will never be.

Cannot.

*

There is fire and snow and sharp air. She is solid and heavy, rooted deep into the heart of the world. She has risen and risen, forced her way into the sky. Now the deep heat within her rises, settles, and then she burns.

*

Brigid comes back to herself still skating, circling, twisting. The ice is all blood, their skates cut through it without leaving a mark, and still Coach chants, steady and low. Her throat aches like she’s been screaming for hours, and her body is one solid pain.

She feels, for a moment, like fire and ice and water and blood, each of those things and all together.

One final word from Coach and a deep rumble rocks through them, sending them all to the ice. She falls into the blood, can barely manage to fall right. Doesn’t break anything, but she’ll be bruised all over and the impact sends pain shooting through the wounds on her arms.

Brigid lies on her back, blood hot around her, and closes her eyes.

*

When she comes back to herself again, she’s sitting in the locker room with the rest of the team. It’s warm there, and dry. A towel is draped over her shoulders. Her arms have been bandaged. She’s not been unconscious, not really, but everything is soft and distant. Already, she’s starting to forget the things she saw, the things she felt, the things she had no choice but to become.

The kraken is gone, Coach promises them. It didn’t rise far enough to do real damage.

The kraken is gone, and they all live, but none of them will be doing anything in the near future. Team illness, Coach says. He’ll make the excuses, keep the pressure off them. They’re nowhere near the season, at least, but it’s still lost time, and Brigid hates it.

Brigid is also so weighed down by exhaustion that she’s afraid she’ll fall right through the floor into the ground beneath and keep going, keep breaking through it until she reaches the molten core.

The kraken is gone, and their strength, but they will return.

And if the gods of hockey love them at all, it will be another century before the kraken returns.

**Author's Note:**

> Couple of nods to specific hockey people, real and fictional, in this, but any nod to a real player is just to the name.
> 
> Women regularly play in the NHL in this world. If we can have krakens, we can have that too.


End file.
